Lucy Waugh, who has died aged 92, was a rarity in the predominantly youthful women's movement of three decades ago. Lucy, sometime typist to the pioneer socialist feminist Sylvia Pankhurst, was already in her 50s when she joined the London women's liberation workshop in 1970. With tidy grey curls and a background as a Walthamstow mum, she defied media stereotypes of wild "women's libbers".

Attracted, along with her daughter Liz, by the hostile publicity the new movement received, she helped start the Walthamstow women's liberation workshop - campaigning with the group for free contraception, abortion and nurseries. She was also active in the London campaign to unionise low-paid women night cleaners.

Her convictions were laced with humour. In the early 1970s, on a local May-Day parade, Lucy sat in a large yellow shoe - made by Val Charlton, creator of the Monty Python Jabberwocky. As "the old woman who lived in a shoe", she was flanked by younger feminists, dressed as her offspring - and they won the right for local women to free contraception.

She had been drawn to 1970s feminism by a suspicion of men and of marriage - based on her experience of her father and her husband - and by a strong desire for younger women to develop a confidence and freedom that had been denied to her.

Lucy was born in London and educated at Walthamstow high school. She came from a large working-class family, but one where her father was a rare presence. She loved school and did not leave until she was 17, but there was no money for any further education.

From the end of the 1920s until the end of the 1930s - when she got married - she worked in the civil service as a shorthand typist. After the first world war, as she recalled to me, a generation of women office workers had little hope of marrying. In a 1975 interview with the feminist magazine Spare Rib, she remembered them as figures out of Jean Rhys's stories, writing desperately to lonely-hearts clubs. She expressed shame at the dread she and her friends had felt about becoming like these older women.

Her husband died in the 1960s. She started working again, as a primary school teacher, a dinner lady, and voluntarily in a hostel for battered women. Her own feelings of injustice had remained private - until the 1970s. But her mother had been active in the Women's Cooperative Guild, and working prewar for Sylvia Pankhurst - whom she found remote and autocratic - brought her into tangential contact with women's movements of the interwar period.